iPhone: Transferring Contacts

The iPhone isn't designed to pick up contacts from your SIM so heres a work around to get your contacts transfered from SIM to iPhone. The basic idea is to get your contacts synced with Outlook. Once they are in Outlook then iTunes will pick them and sync them with the iPhone. The phone that rT was using before the iPhone, was my old Nokia 6620. So I installed the Nokia PC Suite. I put her SIM into the Nokia phone, copied all the contact to the SIM and synced the phone with Outlook using the PC Suite. After cleaning up the contacts a bit, I used iTunes to sync the contacts with the iPhone. Some thing that bugs me about Outlook is that it files the contacts as 'Lastname, Firstname'. Although it allows you to file contacts as 'Firstname Lastname' it wont change the existing contacts to that format. So I got a little script (macro) to refile existing contacts as 'Firstname Lastname' :) Private Sub ReFileContacts() Dim items As items, item As ContactItem, folder As MAPIFolder Dim contactItems As Outlook.items Dim itemContact As Outlook.ContactItem Set folder = Session.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderContacts) Set items = folder.items Count = items.Count If Count = 0 Then MsgBox "Nothing to do!" Exit Sub End If 'Filter on the message class to obtain only contact items in the folder Set contactItems = items.Restrict("[MessageClass]='IPM.Contact'") For Each itemContact In contactItems itemContact.fileas = itemContact.FirstName + " " + itemContact.LastName itemContact.Save Next MsgBox "Your contacts have been re-filed." End Sub Unfortunately, I had already synced the contacts on the iPhone and I didn't have to patience to sit and go through each one and delete them. So... here is a quick way to delete all your iPhone Contacts at once. - create 2 empty text files on your desktop and rename them to: AddressBookImages.sqlitedb and AddressBook.sqlitedb - copy/overwrite these empty files into "/var/root/Library/AddressBook" folder, using WinSCP (SSH client) - this will empty your contacts list, since all contacts are stored in those two files. (This wont take effect untill you restart your Iphone) Once done.. re-sync!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awesome.

You are a genius

Unknown said...

good.

i have recently bought a nokia e75 & need to transfer my contacts from my iphone. pls suggest how to do this????